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In the Shallows

       Still, as the spiral grew, He left the past year’s dwelling for the new.

      The river, wider here,

      held fossils in the shallows.

      These were the famous corals—

      Silurian, Devonian—

      that Agassiz had gathered.

      He made a special trip

      from Cambridge to our county

      after the Civil War.

      The sun beat like a hammer

      on huge, silent mudflats:

      the Iowa River Valley

      of eighteen sixty-eight.

      And it was hot. He sweated,

      the aging professor—

      the tick, tick of his hammer

      echoing off the bluffs—

      but when the sun had set

      six pallets had been loaded

      to take back to Harvard:

      fine specimens of coral,

      some dozen massive sponges,

      and one perfect ammonite:

      a gift for Holmes, the poet

      of the chambered nautilus.

      Nearly a century later,

      the sun beat like a hammer.

      On gray limestone covered

      by scratchy, gray-green lichen,

      my white, hairless body

      felt almost translucent—

      ribcage, backbone, scapula—

      in the relentless sun,

      and sometimes I’d imagine

      the companionable echo

      of my hammer’s tick, tick

      was my colleague, Dr. Agassiz—

      or that my hammer was

      a delayed echo of his:

      that I would be like him,

      distinguished, bearded, tall.

      But it was Time’s own hammer

      that was beating down tick, tick

      on the whole river valley.

      It was Time my hammer echoed

      on the gray rock formations

      as I chipped away another

      brachiopod or mollusk,

      and another, and one more.

       South Siders

      Not the linden pollen, whose spermy being

      dripped, each June, on windshields and collected

      on people’s hats, nor the annual,

      almost welcome advent through

      our windows of box elder bugs—their bodies

      drifting beneath our beds; not cob-

      webs, dustmice, molds that made our houses

      and crabgrass-pimpled, mole-dug yards appear

      animal-friendly: but the fact we

      lived at the edge of town. A subtle

      dust rose from the furrowed fields,

      from loess deposits, seams of shale, twelve decades’

      leavings of cows and chickens, from worms’ turnings,

      to film our mirrors, alter even the taste of

      soup, and darken, if imperceptibly

      at first, the faces we took with us to school.

       Work

      That winter, every morning

      long before dawn, two lights shone

      in the house. A passerby

      (had anyone been passing

      at that hour, in that weather)

      might have thought something

      was wrong—maybe a child

      was sick? but no, it was only

      my mother (downstairs in

      the kitchen) and me (upstairs,

      just getting out of bed, putting

      on jeans and boots). When

      I got downstairs, my mother

      might still be cutting the half

      grapefruit I ate each morning—

      inserting the sharp, delicate

      knife between rind and

      flesh, peeling each segment

      so I could eat it with a spoon…. Into

      the night, then, after breakfast:

      the scarf and gloves she’d made

      me wear keeping me warm and dry,

      I’d walk three blocks to the lamp-

      lit corner where my bundle—

      stiff, snow-crusted—waited,

      slice the twine and stow the

      hundred papers in my sack. War

      in Egypt, hangings in Alabama—

      I walked my route, unconscious

      bearer of the world’s news.

       Singing Head

      This was the end of town.

      Beyond, the farms began—

      the frayed edge of the city

      beyond the White Front Diner

      and the Negroes’ trailer park,

      where cattails filled the ditches.

      Past Brenneman Seeds, past Braverman’s,

      Конец

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